I was gonna take that baby from her. One way or another.
I watched my reflection in the window as Prime’s Bentayga pulled away from the compound. The woman staring back was a stranger.
Hair hanging limp and unwashed. Skin gray and dull. Cheekbones too sharp because I’d dropped almost thirty pounds—couldn’t keep food down, couldn’t taste nothing but metal and bile and the phantom flavor of duct tape adhesive.
My clothes hung off me like they belonged to somebody else. This sweater used to fit. Now I was drowning in it.
I ain’t slept more than two hours at a time since the warehouse. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in that chair. Smelling cigarettes. Feeling hands that wouldn’t stop no matter how hard I screamed.
So I stopped sleeping.
Started pacing instead. Walking the halls of this big ass mansion at 3 AM, 4 AM, 5 AM. Checking locks I’d already checked twenty times. Washing my hands until they cracked and bled because I could still feel HIM on my skin no matter how hard I scrubbed.
The girl who loved Prime Banks was dead.
She died in that warehouse screaming into duct tape while his cousin ripped her apart.
What was left was something else.
I watched until Prime’s taillights disappeared down the driveway. Then I let the mask drop.
My hands were shaking. Not from fear.
From rage.
Prime’s family took everything from me. My ear. My dignity. My body. My mind. My ability to ever feel safe. My ability to sleep without nightmares. My ability to be touched without flinching.
So I was gonna take the most precious thing from him.
That baby.
If Zainab wasn’t locked up right now, I would’ve handled it myself.
I had it all planned out. Wait until she was alone. Break into wherever she was staying. Put a knife to that swollen belly and cut Prime’s baby right out of her while she watched.
Then I’d take it to a bridge—the Key Bridge, maybe, or the one over the Anacostia—and I’d throw it into the water.
Let Prime spend the rest of his life imagining what his daughter’s last moments were like. The cold water. The tiny lungs filling up. The crying that nobody came to answer.
Let that image haunt him the way Thad’s face haunts me every time I close my eyes.
But someone got to Zainab first. Had her arrested before I could make my move.
Didn’t matter. Plans could change.
She was going to prison now. She deserved to rot there for stealing the man I loved, for living the life that was supposed to be mine.
And when that baby came? When they took it away from her because she was a murderer, a criminal, an unfit mother giving birth in a cell?
I would be waiting.
I’d take that child before anyone else could. And I’d finish what I started.
Prime would never hold his daughter. Never hear her first words. Never see her take her first steps. That baby would disappear and he’d spend the rest of his miserable life wondering what happened to her. Did she suffer? Was she scared? Did she cry out for a daddy who never came?
Good.
Let him live with that. Let it eat him alive the way Thad’s hands eat at me every time I close my eyes. Because she will suffer.
